Week 10: Isarithmic Maps

Attached is an isarithmic map of the mean annual precipitation in Georgia. The contour lines were based at 5" rainfall levels. I saw Brandon Isenhart's map while I was working on mine and I liked his legend...I thought it was effective...and resisting the temptation to imitate, I made a more traditional legend where there was not gap between the color symbols.

Week 9: Flow Maps (my better attempt)

Hi Trisha...please note that this is not intended to be my bonus exercise...I wanted to have a history of my own decisions about "good" maps and bad maps. Please use this post for scoring my Week 9 assignment...thanks! :)

Well, I finished my first map and posted it, and then I wanted to go back and make it better ... so I used this lab as an opportunity to delve into greater details with AI. I still find some of the program to be cryptic ... my only real gripe is that I cannot figure out why sometimes the zoom tool permits a "zoom out" option and other times a different dropdown window is activated that does not have the zoom in/zoom out function. ...I am on a mission to figure out the key strokes that toggle between these two dropdown windows ... because it is REALLY difficult to zoom back to the full extent if you can't activate the darn zoom out tool! :) On a more serious note, I think I have created a better flow map in the second go-around.

Week 9: Flow Maps

The attached map shows the relative influx of permananent legal U.S. citizens originating from the various regions of the world. The map-type is referred to as a flow map where the width of each flow-arrow is proportional to the relative numbers of individuals successfully moving from one place to another. I created a literally accurate legend based on the data from which the arrows were made because there were a manageable number of values (9) to put in the legend without the legend becoming too cumbersome. I learned much more about AI although I find many of the tools to be cryptic and hidden in less-than-helpful places. The program also seems to be inconsistent in many ways...for example, with the zoom tool, one time you can right click and access the "zoom out" function, but then, with what seem to be the same key strokes, there is a completely different drop-down menu and no clear way to "zoom out". Most good software packages have more than one way to do the same function...AI seems to be lacking in this flexibility and so you would truly have to become "expert" with its use before you could feel a reasonable level of comepetence with the software as a whole (still expecting good things though!).

Week 8: Dot Map Assignment

This is a dot distribution map of the available housing units in Florida counties. The source of this information was the US Census 2000 data from Census Table GCT-PH1, Population, Housing Units, Area and Density: 2000. Although I had calculated the Housing Density and Population Density from this data set, I determined that it would be most appropriate to use the raw data for housing unit numbers and to place the dots in inhabitable areas (as directed by the course materials). By using the raw data and proper placement of the dots, the "housing density" is summarized by the resulting density of dots in the inhabitable regions of each county. Other presentations of the data might want to use the inhabitablt area of a county when calculating the housing density or the population density. This assignment introduced me to yet another type of map that has significant application value for certain types of data presentation. :) ...I liked it! OOPS, just realized I forgot to put my name and data on it...will update later.

Week 6: Chloropleth Maps (part 3 - update)

Well, I realized that I didn't understand the instructions the first time around, so I decided that I should go back and try complete this assignment the right way! :) Working in ArcMap, I created new layers for each division and I changed the base colors to match a chloropleth legend scale. However, there was a layer detail that I couldn't identify that kept making the New England Division a darker gray than I intended...so I selected each New England state in Adobe Illustrator and changed the gray to a lighter tone. I'm not happy with the scaling on Alaska and would do a few other things to improve this map aesthetically, but I will focus on these functions in future assignments. Argh...that was a matter of back-tracking to catch up from two weeks of being inundated with my other work. ...back on track now !!! :)

Week 7: Proportional Symbol Mapping

The map presented here conveys the 2005 European Wine Consumption rates (www.wineinstitute.org) in units of thousands of gallons per year. This is produced as a proportional map and the detail cartographic work work created in Adobe Illustrator. I grouped the countries by what I believe to be five natural breaks. This caused there to be two countries in the highest consumption category with the value in the legend corresponding to the highest consumption rate. Each legend value corresponds to the highest consumption rate for each break. The Vatican City is the "les than 60" symbol that rests in the larger circle for Italy.